Hmm… I reckon our federation setup may take a bit of getting used to.
I just went through searching here for dozens of people I follow from elsewhere and only found @JayatiGhosh.
Then searched for @mikebithell even knowing his handle, but found nothing, presumably because it only searches my home instance?
Can we search across the whole federation, or are we supposed to go around doing our searches on each instance?
@miblo He pops up for me instantly and I'm on the same instance as you
@MegaWolf Oh, interesting! Do you follow him and, if so, did he pop up when you weren't following him? And are you using the web client at https://mas.to, rather than an app (if one exists)?
Now that I follow him, I see Mike does show up for me.
Also, I've discovered we can search another instance by appending, e.g. @mastodon.social, but it seems that only works for usernames, not display names.
@MegaWolf Wow, cool! This actually sounds pretty fancy to me.
I mean, contextual awareness is something that'll probably need to be integral to the comms platform I plan to make, so it can figure out what to present to users, since it won't just be a traditional least–most recent timeline.